TSB’s account pays a solid interest rate, but the promise of £78 a year if you keep your account in the maximum amount of credit isn’t a big enough incentive for most people.

M&S’s new free account is brilliant…but only if you’re a regular M&S shopper.

And now Tesco has waded in — the bank everyone was hoping would cause a stir. But all it’s going to do is annoy its poorer and older customers.

You can only apply online or over the phone; just one in 11 stores has a branch; it costs £5 a month if you don’t pay in £750 a month; and the big perk — Clubcard points for shopping — pays a pretty poor reward.

The dilemma for Tesco when launching its current account was always going to be about floorspace.

Every foot dedicated to a bank is a foot less that can be used to flog beans and bananas. So it has managed to convince itself branches are not needed — falling for the myth that everyone banks online.

The account has been dreamt up by tech-savvy boffins who spend their lives on Twitter, use apps for their banking, shop online, and are permanently attached to their iPhones.

While it is true that online banking — particularly the use of apps — is soaring, 6.4million Britons have never used the internet. And those that use it the least are lower-income households in more rural locations — precisely the people who could desperately do with a bank branch at their local Tesco.

I’d have thought the whole appeal of banking with your favourite supermarket would be that you can pop in to pick up a loaf of milk, buy a jar of Marmite and put some cash in your account.

Sadly, instead of launching a challenge to the big High Street names, all Tesco has done is play right into their hands.

Pension feud

Behind closed doors, an almighty row is raging over George Osborne’s great election promise that we’d all get free, face-to-face financial advice about our pensions.

Reforms: Behind closed doors, an almighty row is raging over George Osborne's great election promise that we'd all get free, face-to-face financial advice about our pensions

The debate centres around how this advice — the so-called Guidance Guarantee — should be delivered.

Will it be by insurers or an independent body? Who will pay for it? Will it be on an individual basis or can groups of workers be seen together? Who will promote it? Will it be regulated so the advisers are held accountable for their recommendations?

And there’s a key question that hasn’t been answered by the insurance industry: what is in the best interests of pension savers?

Most outside observers agree that retiring workers need impartial advice — which means that insurers should not be giving it.

However, insurers say they have customers’ best interests at heart. Yet their businesses survive only if they can convince pensioners to take out their products. It’s impossible for them to be impartial — and their track record proves it.

Giving out advice is going to be an expensive pain — but insurers seem very keen to be involved.

They’ve even hired a costly consultancy firm to show how they can do it.

They’re also trying to stop the Government from running a mass advertising campaign, and have warned of a pensions ‘Armageddon’, in which entire computer systems collapse under the weight of people seeking help — a scenario similar to the Obama-care rush for services that greeted President

Obama’s healthcare reforms in the U.S.

How typical of insurers to see a surge of workers getting advice on pensions as a bad thing! If anything, it would be a terrific achievement.

But the last thing insurers want is for savers to suddenly start asking questions about their pension — or having someone tell them that after all this time, they may just be stuck in a rotten deal.

Dim view

I used to think that the Financial Service Authority was a pretty pathetic watchdog. But it’s not a patch on how inept and out of touch energy regulator Ofgem is.

Many things it suggests to make things easier for consumers actually seem to make life less fair.

The latest example came this week and involved small player Ovo, which routinely offers the cheapest energy tariffs and pays interest to customers who are in credit.

It’s a fair and laudable policy, and one that has intensely annoyed the big suppliers, who have sat on millions of pounds of our overpayments for years.

But now Ofgem has decided that the interest payment flouts its new rules that limit the number of tariffs firms can offer — and has told Ovo to scrap it. What a piece of bloody-minded meanness.

If Ofgem is working in the interests of consumers, it’s got a funny way of showing it. Rather, this piece of incompetence shows it is more concerned with looking after the big names than making sure consumers get a fair deal.

What makes Ofgem seem even more inept is that it hasn’t clamped down on Scottish Power, one of the ‘Big Six’ suppliers, which offers a far more complicated payment for in-credit customers.

The solution to ensuring we had financial regulation that balanced the needs of consumers with those of big institutions was to have two separate City watchdogs.